Imagining Alternative Worlds explores how the far right employs fictionality as a powerful political tool in the 21st century.

It does so by examining the far right’s own cultural production and commentary through a large collection of its novels, novellas, short stories, and film reviews, illustrating how the ‘alternative worlds’ articulated in such cultural products convey its ideology. More specifically, the book identifies and analyses four distinct far-right cultural imaginaries – a ‘primordial’, a ‘nostalgic’, a ‘promethean’, and a ‘nihilist’ one – that each subtly conveys different yet linked ideas about space, time, ‘race’, gender, and heroic identity. By drawing attention to the cultural heterogeneity of the contemporary far right, Imagining Alternative Worlds offers key insights into the dreams, identities, and norms such actors hope will define our future.

The book will be of interest to researchers of the far right, of literary, media and communication studies, and of social and cultural history.

Christoffer Kølvraa is Associate Professor at the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on right-wing discourses and voices in Europe and the US, especially their affective performativity through provocation and ‘playfulness’.

Bernhard Forchtner is Associate Professor at the School of Arts, Media and Communication, University of Leicester, United Kingdom. His research focuses on European far-right parties and movements, especially their narrative self-construction and their discourses about environmental issues.